Shrik and Leto Hisen didn’t just meet. They clashed into each other, just like the first time they met back in days they did not know anything that had ever drastically changed their lives forever.

  Their enemies however dragged them over the devastated cobbled footpath.

  Leto plunged his sword hilt deep into the footpath. His storm condensed sword. It unbound itself at the tip deep underground. Each new tendril slipped into cracks waiting to be released.

  With a bloodied face and burned nose, he spoke at his perpetrator’s general direction. “Want to see something magical?”

  The enemy dragging him found Leto becoming heavier to move, so he upped his cata into one of his lesio.

  Not receiving an answer, Leto simply gave a bloodied grin. The footpath below exploded. Caving below them.

  A half demolished building barely hanging by began falling atop the two. Leto dragged his face across the falling ground and looked at his friend, or so he thought of Shrik.

  Shrik’s eyes bloodshot still reflected the same grin Leto had. “NO!!” He sunk his stumped right elbow in the ground below.

  “Oh! Are you trying to become a fulminar being again?” The one grabbing his leg had the same melodic tune in it. It became Shrik’s personal fuel for his possible future nightmares, if he survived.

  He did not care the one grabbing his foot plunged her fingers into his bones. He forced his severed arm blocks away to become fulminar lightning and come to his aid.

  “Really!” She now had peered into how his lesio truly worked. “So, you store the property of lightning in every cell! Wonderful.” Her pupils turned from pure black to swirling brown.

  Inches away from being caught in the lesio of his enemy, he chose to blast as many of the debris falling over and around Leto. His lightning-made arm came on his call. Fracturing as many of the large boulders of debris as it could.

  Her lesio rather began making popping sounds. Pockets of air collapsing on itself creating light. Small pockets and each surrounding her and Shrik.

  One became two, two became six, six became twenty. The pockets of air began acting as if they were under deep ocean collapsing and multiplying.

  Shrik too focused on trying to save his colleague to see that. A colleague he felt a bit of comfort with.

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  In a very different part of the city, away from the lament of two acquaintances. Two girls, battle worn, were making headway through collapsed ruins of their home city.

  Cyn and her follower felt too out of place in a battle where even their own imagination seemed paler than the reality of their world.

  Cyn chose to not be drowned in the screams of battle. So she talked to the girl she had saved.

  Shriveling breath went in her. “Hey, I, um..I am Cyn.” She looked back to her side as she held the other girl’s hand tightly. “What’s yours?”

  The other girl completely caught on the terrifying laugh they were witnesses to did not register Cyn’s words.

  “Um?” Cyn considered hooking her arm. ‘Maybe that could bring her…’ And she did.

  The girl panicked. “What! What!” She looked all over other than Cyn. At last when Cyn coughed, she looked at her.

  “I, uh said, I am Cyn.” She gave the gentlest smile she could muster. “What is yours?”

  “Didn’t I tell you before already?” The girl gulped down empty air.

  Cyn’s smile simply had a crack. But she kept it up. And pulled the girl forward across another street.

  The street itself had become a drag path. Cyn’s grip on the broken sword whitened her knuckles. To her it seemed near impossible to someone creating this.

  The girl next to her whispered. “A caestre?”

  It hit her too. Something that massive making a street be a drag path? Only a caestre would fit. But where did such a caestre come from?

  Cyn pulled on the girl’s arm. “Hurry,” she whispered through her gritted teeth, panic laden in her eyes. “I need to find…,” a shockwave after shockwave slammed right where they were about to step on.

  She pulled her to a different direction into a building. The roof blown off.

  Crouching next to a wall. Cyn gripped her sword as she slammed her other hand to keep the girl’s mouth shut. While the girl’s head acted to shut her own mouth partially.

  “Wmm oumm tmmre?” The girl’s eyes widened in the unknown horror’s mere speculation.

  Meanwhile, Don Extea right in the center of the western outskirts of the city of Sevenren. He had driven out some of the insurgents from the nation of Thrysco before. He found himself in the center of a knights of Streno encirclement.

  “First, bring people out of the safe house. Then transport them?” He glared at every single one of the knights accusatorily. Within himself he had guessed more than enough after encountering the knights of Streno that were here.

  ‘None of them really do have their own soul in their body.’

  Volleys of warping breaches fell from above. Extea simply dug under.

  Each of his punch breaking apart the ground below. After twenty six punches within less a tenth of a second, the ground below had caved far enough that Extea fell into an underground pathway.

  He rolled into safety as the warping breaches connected.

  The ground melted first. Then life bloomed only to wither away and be followed by silvery condensation. That blasted itself down and down.

  Not waiting to be caught. Don Extea crawled into the one of the three paths he could take from where he was in the underground pathways.

  Drip, drip, drip, something fell into the pathways around him. He did not light it. He knew better than to simply trust the light.

  “Mmm, fascinating.”

  The mere existence of those sounds sent his entire body into overdrive. His crawl became a sprint in no time.

  Whereas, Cyn and the girl kept their breaths held within. Waiting.

  A caestre of bulbous body and limbs dragged and dropped itself every five seconds. And right now, it was resting mere metres away from Cyn and the girl.